Shape-changer

Continuing with the simple animations from the Cartooning book, here’s an exercise in shape changing. Hissey and Tappenden didn’t specify that these mysterious events should be taking place above the little town of Horbury in the Calder Valley, but why not? This is a Shape Tween in progress.

Adobe Animate Shortcuts

keyboard shortcuts

As with any Adobe software, you can speed up your workflow in Animate by learning the keyboard shortcuts and Hissey and Tappenden include a helpful list (in Flash, but the keyboard shortcuts have been retained in Animate). Getting really familiar with these by sticking a few labels to my Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard also helps me grasp the basic workings of the program.

Dog-eared

Another simple animation from The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden. This is about as simple as animating gets: one layer is the paper background, then there’s the puppy, minus its left ear, and finally the ear itself, pivoting up and down on an anchor point on the puppy’s head.

You convert the ear into a Symbol and the book mentions that in Flash you can store as many as 16,000 symbols in the library! Probably more now that Adobe has replaced Flash with Animate, but I intend to keep things as simple as possible. One Symbol is a start though.